


Hauntings

by Graywaren



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-27 06:12:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7606795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Graywaren/pseuds/Graywaren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It’s been weeks since anyone last saw Noah. He’s growing thinner and thinner each visitation, like a moth caught between double-panes of glass, degrading in the sun. Someday, Maura had told them, while he’d tried very hard not to listen, Noah would be reduced to whispers and tricks of light and cold down the backs of people’s spines, an ordinary haunting. </i>
</p><p>An alternate after-the-end story in which Noah is slowly disappearing. Ronan-centric. Plays fast and loose with canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hauntings

The sun is only just starting to set when Opal comes screaming upstairs, her hooves clattering on the stairs. “KERAH, KERAH.”

Ronan stands up. He’d been kneeling in a dusty bar of light, poking through a pile of things that Adam had left behind yesterday, after Ronan had driven him back to the airport to return to college. It had taken him a few hours to gather them from all corners of the house — a hairband, a broken charger, a handful of batteries, a faded blue shirt with the Nike logo, and an assortment of other acquired knick-knacks. 

He is aware that this behaviour is slightly odd but — point A — the only one who will ever see it was Opal, who eats twist-ties and — point B — he likes being surrounded by other people’s clutter. It’s proof that he didn’t make them up, that they’re more than just a dream which had hooked its talons in a little deeper than the others. Anyway, Adam might want some of it back next time. 

He yanks the door open. “What?” 

Opal stares up at him with big unblinking eyes. “The cow’s having a baby.” 

“I know it is.” He’d checked on her a couple hours ago. She’d been doing just fine. Ronan prefers to leave the cows alone to give birth, reckoning they know how to do what they need to do better than he does. 

She pulls her hat low over her head. “Noah says there’s going to be trouble.” 

Ronan freezes. “What?” 

“Noah,” she says, then turns away and starts back down the stairs. Ronan follows her. 

“Where is Noah, then?” It’s been weeks since anyone last saw him. He’s growing thinner and thinner each visitation, like a moth caught between double-panes of glass, degrading in the sun. Someday, Maura had told them, while he’d tried very hard not to listen, Noah would be reduced to whispers and tricks of light and cold down the backs of people’s spines, an ordinary haunting. 

Opal shrugs. 

“Opal,” he says. 

“I heard him. I didn’t see him. I don’t know where he is.” 

Light cracks crooked through the kitchen, dying everything in oranges and golds. He grabs a bottle disinfectant off the sink as he passes, then shoves the screen door open with his shoulder. It creaks and shuts behind him. 

Outside, it’s hot as purgatory. Insects creak and buzz in the browning grass. “You have no idea,” he says. “No guesses.” 

She spits out something in the tree-language. He rubs the disinfectant on his hands and arms, then flicks droplets onto her cloven hooves. She skips away, laughing the horrible laugh that they share. 

They make a brief diversion into one of the barns to grab the calving chains, then head out into the cow pens. The dream cows are clustered in one corner of the field, where Gansey and Blue and Adam had helped put them, in order to make room for the real cows. The dream cows breathe soft dream breaths. Their ears do not twitch. Ronan, as he always does, passes his fingers in front of one of their noses as he passes, just to make sure. 

Opal grabs his elbow. “Hurry.” 

The cow is in the far corner of the field, having separated herself from the rest to have her baby. She is a soft brownish colour, the closest in tone to his dream cattle. He rubs his palms across her side, then kneels to check on her progress.

His stomach twists. Noah, wherever he is, was right — the calf has twisted up horribly. He takes a breath, then wraps the chains around its forelocks. It will make it, if he does his job properly. 

Shoulder by shoulder, he hauls the calf out of her mother. It is heavy, messy work, but when he’s done the calf falls out so quickly that it nearly crushes him. He drops to his knees beside it, scrapes the mucus out of its nostrils with his fingers, and is reaching for a piece of grass to tickle its nose with when the air grows suddenly cold. 

Ronan pulls back.

The wind curls and blows in the wrong direction. It is frozen air, so cold that it hurts in the summer heat. He feels as though he’s stuck his hand in a bucket of ice. 

The calf sneezes, and breathes. 

Ronan turns. There is nothing around him, nothing at all. “Noah,” he says. 

The air is warming already. 

When he turns back, the cow is licking her baby clean. Opal makes a face at him, then drops backwards, her arms spread like wings, completely silent. The frozen grass breaks beneath her. 

#

When he walks inside, the house has become quite definitively haunted. 

The dishes rattle in the cupboards, and the taps turn on when he passes them and won’t turn off, spilling cold water directly into their drains. The gurgle fills all the pipes in all the walls.  The kitchen sink has cloths that his mother embroidered beneath them. He takes them and folds them up carefully beneath his bed, where they will be safe. 

The milk curdles. His favourite cup, the one without any bottom which holds liquid nonetheless, flings itself across the room and smashes against the wall. Ronan takes the pieces and puts them in a box at the back of his closet. He has a horrible image of the pipes breaking, spilling water into the walls his father built, rotting them beyond repair.     
  


#

 After three days of this, he calls Adam on Skype — something which, after much experimentation, they’ve decided is an acceptable way to communicate over long distances.

“He’s trying to say something,” Ronan says. “But I don’t know what.

Adam shrugs. “Maybe try leaving out some Tarot cards?” He’s sitting cross-legged on his bed — Ronan can see the headboard behind him, a pillow pushed up against it, and the stark white of Adam’s wall rising up above both of these. One headphone snakes up past his shoulder and into his ear. They’d cut the other one off — Ronan has it in his pile. 

Ronan, for his part, is perched on the the kitchen table, with his phone up on a stack of cookbooks. He is eyeing the cupboards warily, lest Noah throw something else in his direction. “I don’t know how to read them.” 

“You could look up the meanings. It’s not difficult. Or ask Cabeswater if it’s got anything. Did the cow make it?” 

“What? Oh, yeah. It’s fine. Toddling around the yard like it’s fifty-nine. You think I should go down to the ley line and jostle his body a bit? See if it reconnects?” 

“I absolutely do not think you should do that,” Adam says. “What if you jostle it wrong?” Then, “There might not be anything you can do. He’s leaving.” 

He doesn’t say it cruelly, but bluntly, as a plain fact. Adam’s relationship with Noah has always been a strange one, if no stranger than Adam’s relationships with all people — Adam doesn’t truck much with made-up things, even made-up things that love glitter and gelato. Still, Ronan knows he loves Noah as fiercely as the rest of them. He’d been willing to give up Glendower’s favour, all of its richness and guarantees, for him. 

Ronan blows out a long breath. “I don’t like it,” he says. 

Adam watches him steadily. “Of course you don’t. It’s horrible.” 

Through the windows, whatever there is of Noah howls.  
 

#

He kneels at the foot of his bed and prays, what his mother would call a Judas prayer, ungrateful and wanting. _Please, God, I’ve asked for so much and you’ve given me so little. Not my father, not my mother. Let me have this one thing, this one scared boy. I’ll do every rosary in the world._

He grips his hands together so tightly that his knuckles turn white. He stays there for a long time, in the dark, until Chainsaw caws for food and he gets up to give it to her. 

#

It’s still dark when he wakes. He allows himself a full thirty seconds to stay where he is and feel helpless, then rubs the back of his wrist across his eyes and creeps out of bed. 

The floorboards are cold against his feet. The house, dark, seems as if it were waiting. It always is — he thinks of it, sometimes, like a loyal dog with its ears perked, waiting for Niall and Aurora Lynch to come home. 

The moon is full tonight. He sees it through the windows as he passes, looking like a sliver of bone at the bottom of a river. It dusts the house with silver, bright enough to see with. 

He leaves the lights off. He knows this house the way he once knew the leaves that grow above Cabeswater, or the leaves that are growing now. Here is the clock that moves according to a twenty-six hour day. Here is the kitchen, here are the chipped mugs on open shelves which he drunk hot chocolate form, nestled between his mother and father while they argued over the particulars of his birth. 

Before last year, he hadn’t known that you could build a hone out of grief, much less one that you could be happy in, but here it is. 

From somewhere outside the house, he hears Chainsaw’s high, creaking voice. 

He steps outside. The clouds moving across the sky are black, and the grass is black too, shifting very slightly in the wind. 

Ronan squints. There, moving almost invisibly, he sees Chainsaw light across the cow pasture. He takes a bare-footed step into the grass. 

From behind him, the screen door creaks open, then slams shut. He turns. 

Opal is standing there. Her hat is pulled low, almost to her eyes, and Adam’s watch gleams in the moon. 

“Well,” he says. “Come on, then.” 

They walk out past the hulking silhouettes of the barns, the small and fragile silhouettes of his cattle. Opal takes his arm. Her hands are very small, and very cold. Her hoofbeats are soft. 

“What’s wrong?” he asks. She shakes her head. 

The calf stands in the centre of the pasture. Chainsaw pecks at its feet, her wings held stiffly. When Ronan steps forward, he is expecting something horrible — some strange omen, something split open and bloody — but there is only the calf and then, quite suddenly, Noah is kneeling before her, holding out a hand so that it can lick it. 

He is smiling, a real smile, one that breaks across his whole pale face. He is more smudge than boy, now, but he is still here. Something behind Ronan’s ribcage releases, something he hadn’t known was caught. 

Opal lets go and, with a small cry, runs to Noah. Noah laughs, so soft that it sounds like something falling. 

Ronan sits beside them. “What are you doing outside?” 

Noah doesn’t turn. He tears a handful of grass out of the ground and holds it up for the calf to eat. “I didn’t want to leave.” 

“Who said you had to leave?” 

The calf is eating straight out of his palm. His ghost-ness does not seem to bother it. Noah puls his hands apart, and the grass falls straight through, but the calf keeps licking at his fingers. 

“Everyone knows I do. Everyone knows I’m a coward because I won’t. I don’t want to be afraid anymore. 

Ronan thinks of Kavinsky, burning up by the heat of his own dragon. Gansey, crumpled to the ground. He runs his knuckle down the thick line of scar tissue that marks the centre of his arm, thinks of the months he’d spent sending night horrors after himself without meaning to. “I don’t see what’s so brave about wanting to die, anyway. It’s never done anyone I know any good.” 

Noah bites his lip. 

If Ronan looks too hard, the blur on Noah’s face stops looking like a blur and starts looking like what it is, which is shattered bone, buried in a forest that had once been full of magic but is now notable only for its proximity to the ley lines. He chooses not to look too hard. 

“Listen,” Ronan says. “I know you’re going to. But I hate it. We all hate it. We’re going to — we’ll tend to your body. We’ll keep the ley line strong. We’ll fight it off as long as we can. I don’t think you should feel cowardly for trying to live. I think you should feel brave for doing it all of the time. 

Noah isn’t looking at him. He can feel more than see him trying to disappear. 

“When I go,” he says. “I think you’ll forget me. I don’t want you to forget me.” 

“I won’t forget you,” Ronan says. 

From her place at Noah’s side, Opal mumbles something in Latin. It takes Ronan a few seconds to work out the translation — don’t make promises you can’t keep. Something in Ronan’s chest hurts very deeply. 

“I don’t want to forget you,” Ronan tells him, more honestly. 

Noah ducks his head, sending pale floppy hair all over his face. 

“I think you should have the calf,” Ronan says. Noah looks up. 

“Why?” 

“You saved her life, didn’t you? With the wind and shit, and when you called me. So she’s yours.” He stands, then jerks his head towards the house. Opal stands, too. She scrabbles to his side again and takes his arm. He’s made a decision. 

“Come on. I need your help with something.” 

“With what?” 

“With Cabeswater. I’m remaking it. It’s boring. I need your weird shit, your Raven’s Day shit.” 

Noah looks up at him. “I like those birds.” 

“Well, I thought they were weird.” He holds out his hands. Noah looks at him, then takes it. 

For a moment, all Ronan can feel is bone and earth and graveyard air. It passes, and he becomes just a boy again. Ronan pulls him to his feet, and takes him home. 

#

He curls up in bed that night, looking for Cabeswater. Even two years after the sacrifice, it is still a fragile thing. 

It had been a forest then, and it is a forest now. Ronan doesn’t know if that’s something intrinsic to itself, or if it would be different had it grown up in someone else’s head. It is still an unformed thing, more light than trees, so bright that it’s almost impossible to see anything in it. 

He steps into it alone, brushing past bushes which claw at him with their thorns. Ronan’s mind is much kinder than it had been even before his father’s murder, when he first made Cabeswater, but it is still hostile towards itself. 

Ronan’s never put anything into his dreams before, but he knows it’s possible, because Piper had done it. She’d done it horribly, but that doesn’t mean he has to. 

He’s going to make Cabeswater better than it was before. He will give it places in which to hide, and spaces where his friends can stay and spent their time, if they’d like. There will be roses for his mother and strange animals wandering through his trees for his father. There will be rivers. Mountains. Birds with impossible black wingspans, and simple things for Matthew to love. 

Maybe it will even have a place for the ORBMASTER. 

Now, though, in the ordinary world, Noah is sitting beside him, whispering instructions into his ear. Strange dreams of his own, imaginings from a lifetime ago and from the strange new life he’s built himself after dying in those woods. 

He doesn’t just want his own dream-things, built according to Noah’s instructions. He wants Noah’s own dreams, living here of their own accord. 

_Amabo te_ , Ronan whispers. Please let this be possible.

He sits, and shuts his eyes. 

Cabeswater listens. 

Around him, Noah begins to create.


End file.
